FIG. 1A is a plan view of a connector 100 after a known repair method has been completed. FIG. 1B shows a sectional view along line I-I from FIG. 1A.
The connector 100 comprises a skin portion 102 of an aircraft or spacecraft (not described in greater detail) which has a damaged region in the form of a hole 104. The skin portion 102 is for example formed from a fibre composite material in the form of carbon fibre reinforced plastics material (CFRP).
For repairing the skin portion 102, it is known to arrange a patch 106 on the skin portion 102 in such a way that the patch 106 covers the hole 104. The patch 106 is also produced from a fibre composite material, in particular CFRP.
Hereafter, the patch 106 is riveted to edge regions 108, which delimit the hole 104. Corresponding rivets are denoted in FIGS. 1A and 1B by way of reference numerals 112, 114. For the sake of clearer presentation, the number of rivets in FIGS. 1A and 1B do not match.
If a load F is applied to the connector 100 in the same direction in which the rivets 112, 114 are also arranged, in FIG. 1A from left to right, each of the outermost rivets 112 bear the maximum load, each bearing for example 40% of the load, while the inner rivets 114 only bear a fraction of the load, for example only 10% of the load. This is shown in FIG. 3 by the dash-dotted line. The rivets from FIG. 1A are shown on the x-axis. The loads FN to be carried by each of these rivets are shown on the y-axis. This is a purely qualitative approach to illustrating the present problem.
The outer rivets 112 bear a comparatively high load FN, and, depending on the composition of the skin portion 102, this means that the skin portion 102 cannot easily be repaired using this method known from the prior art, since this would lead to the rivet 112 being pulled out of the corresponding point in the skin portion 102. However, even if the skin portion 102 is formed in a suitably stable manner, the method known from the prior art still poses the problem that the patch 106 has to be provided in a correspondingly stable manner in order for the load FN to be able to be borne at the point of the outer rivet 112. However, this brings about weight disadvantages.
Further, DE 10 2009 001 075 A1 discloses a repair method known from the prior art.